MORALITY

Artwork by artist Carla Petelski

//

The roads are as much mine, as they are yours. Yet, you stand and stare from those jagged doors.

Like a mute witness to an accidental staging. Your hysterical flags of morality raging.

That questionable glare and the questioning look.

Now a part of my everyday look-book.

Accusing me of profanity

What is only but my vanity.

Yes;

I am curious and I am queer.

I am like the scent of a tear.

Sour, with a tinge of sweetness.

Perhaps, a bit too much for your bleakness.

A thousand concealed red suns burn.

As I willfully twist and turn.

Believe me or not there is no mistake.

In the wake of my honorable fate.

Yet I am infinitely more.

Than the image your eyes can score.

Steal a wave of my delight.

I am who I amin darkness and in light.

But, often times I wonder-

Are you off your disguise somewhere yonder.

When the moon outshines the light.

Do your masks fall off revealing your true plight?

//

The funny thing is, I do not remember writing this. I probably wrote it a few years ago as an aid for a visual essay a photographer friend wanted to shoot. When I found it recently in my folders, while searching for something else, I reread it at least half a dozen times, trying to remember if I had actually written it. And then, faintly, I remembered the reason I wrote it.

*

This is the beauty of being a writer—you can feel something so deeply that it moves you to put an emotion into words that you may not fully identify with, but can still emote on paper. I wish more people understood that being a writer is about feeling things; about being able to put your own or someone else’s emotions into words; and about, perhaps, not having lived an experience but still finding the vocabulary to write it.

I also wish more people who hired writers, especially screenwriters understood that we are wordsmiths for a reason. I don’t necessarily need to have gone through an experience to write about it. Maybe it’s empathy, maybe it’s a gift—whatever it is, I am so glad writing choose to be born through me.

*

I am, and will always be, an ally. And I am so happy to have bumped into a part of my psyche that had been very much forgotten.